Art and Property Now: Room 5, Redrawing the Maps

Art and Property Now is an exhibition exploring John Berger’s life as
storyteller, artist and critic. Visit the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House, London,
until November 10, 2012. We have celebrated Berger’s 86th birthday with a
guided tour of some of the exhibition’s contents and themes. Today, Room 5 and several invitations.

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In 2009, John Berger donated sixty years’ worth of his
papers, accumulated in his stables in the French Alps, to the British
Library. The exhibition of that archive, Art
and Property Now, begins with pieces from the Forties and Fifties by Berger,
Leon Kossoff and others, and runs up to the 2009 collaboration with Alan Kane
and Artangel, Life Class. To celebrate John Berger’s
86th birthday, openDemocracy is this week inviting you to a daily guided
tour of the exhibition, which is divided into five sections, by room, connected
by the photographer Jean Mohr’s sequence of portraits of Berger. This week also
sees free activities, discussions, workshops, screenings and collaborations in
the exhibition: redrawingthemaps.org.uk.

Room 5 invites you into this company, as part of a
series of participatory collaborations.

Room 5 takes its name from
Geoff Dyer’s introduction to Berger’s Selected
Essays (2001). There, he argues: “It is not enough simply
to lobby for Berger’s name to be printed more prominently on an existing map of
literary reputations; his example urges us fundamentally to alter its shape.”

But as the programme for Redrawing the Maps says further down:

“It
would be easy to have spent this week celebrating the literary reputation of
John Berger, but to do so would have been to miss the point he has made in so
many ways, with many collaborators and from different angles. Instead, we took
his work as a point of departure - a landmark for some of us, a new discovery
for others - from which to question the maps we have inherited and to try
sketching out other maps that might make sense of our experience and the
situation of the world today.”

During the run of the
exhibition, Room 5 has offered visitors an opportunity to take up the
invitation offered by Room
3: ‘To be continued by the reader…’. There have been life-drawing classes,
talks and letter-writing workshops, inspired by the mystery and warmth of the
archive – Berger added
one to the collection himself when he visited:

Letter from John Berger.

– but also a space for
visitors to sit and talk about what they’ve seen.

Starting on his birthday (November
5) and running until the close of the exhibition (November 10) Redrawing the Maps invited suggestions
via an online form; the programme has been brought together by Arthur Swindells, Ben Vickers and Dougald
Hine, who have a shared history of involvement in ‘Free Schools’ such as
the Temporary School of Thought and the Really Free School. In an introductory
text, Dougald explained:

“There
are certain writers whose work acts as a landmark by which people find their
bearings in the world. From the 1950s to the present day, Berger has played
this role for generations of readers. To take his work seriously is to be led
into a process of redrawing the maps: not only, as Dyer says, the map of
literary reputations, but of art, politics, time, place, the situation of the
world today. Over
the course of this exhibition, Redrawing
the Maps will bring together conversations between people from different
generations and different worlds to whom Berger’s work has mattered. In
the final week (5–10 November) – inspired by the “free schools” and informal
learning spaces where art and activism meet – we will host an open programme of
conversations and workshops, to revisit the paths which his work has opened up
for us and to follow them in new directions. The
aim is not to create a spectacle with an audience, but to offer an open
invitation to anyone who wants to host or take part in a conversation,
collaboration or workshop within this space. For more information about how to
get involved, visit the Redrawing the
Maps website: www.redrawingthemaps.org.uk ”

Writing this on Wednesday
night, there have already been a wonderful range of sessions, from Chris
Erskine leading a discussion of Jacques Lacan and activism, to Viv Goodings’ “lesson
in not taking ourselves too seriously”: and the three hours’ worth of dancing of
varying degrees of wonkiness I had to leave early to write this article. As
Dougald writes, this isn’t Berger Bible-study; many of the sessions have passed
without any specific mention of the exhibition’s subject, but they’ve all been
united by the warmth and openness that characterises his work.

It
was also an example of the kind of conversations across generations and
backgrounds the week aimed to set up. A preliminary discussion a few weeks
earlier, Remember the Future? raised the question of whether or not there’s
a comparison to be made between
the current state of political
activism – not least, in the context of a University-owned space, student
activism – and the situation after the revolutionary defeats of 1968. What Are We Fighting For, a session between
5-6 on Saturday, invites a closer look at the situation people seeking change find
ourselves in.

In
1968, ‘the road was cleared,’ Berger reflected, ‘for what, later, would be
called normalization.’ He explored
this in a collaborative film with Alain Tanner, Jonah Who Will Be
25 in the Year 2000 (1976),which shares much withJean-Luc Godard’s 1972 film Tout
Va Bien, not least in its use of the image of a hard-discount supermarket
as a way of describing the socio-political system which emerged triumphant.
Berger calls this ‘economic fascism’ these days, and most recently revisited it
in a supermarket scene in Bento’s
Sketchbook (2011).

The
context for the film was set up by the 1973 essay ‘Between Two Colmars’ which
describes how visiting Grunewald’s
Isenheim altarpiece was, for Berger, an experience that profoundly differs
in 1973 from what it had been in
1963. ‘In a period of revolutionary expectation’, he writes,

“I
saw a work of art which had survived as evidence of the past’s despair; in a
period which has to be endured, I see the same work as miraculously offering a
narrow pass across despair.”

The
essay stops short of this despair; in its metaphorical economy, hope is a lens
that assists focus, rather than obscures it. With his 1963-tinged lens of hope,
he had no need of the side panels, which were painted to offer a hopeful
contrast to the suffering of the central altarpiece. But in the Seventies, this
hope comes from moments of beauty like the altarpieces’ side panels, and from
the next generation: the eponymous Jonah, whose conception and birth provides a
way of imagining the future the soixante-huitardes
are going to bequeath him.

In
the shorter term, the film explores how people might perhaps find non-damaging social
roles again – for example on a market garden-cum-Montessori School rather than in
a supermarket. In response to the
demand Berger made in the novel G. that
‘never
again will a single story be told as though it were the only one’, the script
does all of this by weaving together the lives of characters connected both
arbitrarily – their names all start with M – and by love, work and friendship. As
part of a film programme curated by Gareth Evans, who brought together 2005’s Berger celebration Here is Where We Meet, we’ll screen Jonah on Saturday at 2pm, prefaced by a
session at 12 noon by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, director of Estate, a project that applies Jonah’s
vision to the parlous state of housing – and everything that implies – in early
twenty-first-century London. Focusing on a community in Haggerston, and the
buildings that shelter it, the film deserves its own blurb:

“An iconic East London housing estate (Haggerston),
already transformed by a landmark public artwork, is set in its last days to
become the star of a bold new non-fiction feature film. As an old building is
bulldozed a new construction rises in its place. On this site of creation and
destruction, past and future stand for a moment face to face. The film inhabits
this moment.Capturing a moment of imminent transition, the artist's film Estate:
a Reverie, directed by Andrea Luka Zimmerman, reflects on urgent
matters of regeneration, gentrification and architecture; its reasons,
possibilities and consequences. But more importantly, it is a film about time
and place, dreams and wonder. During this moment, where one structure has
broken down, and a new one is about to form, another space unfolds; a space of
proposals, of uncertainty, and of absolute initiative. In this opening, how
might we ask important questions of our ideas of home, of history, always in
the making, and of our capacities of imagination; that which influences not
only how we’re seen, but also how we see.

Estate, a reverie - an artist's film,
song cycle and installation to be created and performed by the disappearing
community of the Haggerston Estate - is the final and most ambitious project in
a trilogy of collaborative works on the estate led by artist in residence
Andrea Luka Zimmerman, working closely with architectural researcher and writer
David Roberts, following the public
art/photo-installationi
am here (with Lasse Johansson and Tristan Fenell) and the artists' book Estate (Myrdle Court Press, with Lasse
Johansson, Paul Hallam, Cristina Cerully, Victor Buchli), both of which have
gained international acclaim.”

Redrawing the Maps will end between 7.30 and 9 with a general
discussion bringing together all of these themes with Mike Dibb, who has recently made a film
about the jazz musician Barbara Thompson’s struggle with Parkinson’s, (Playing Against Time (2011), showing at 2pm
at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of London Jazz Festival). Besides his work
directing Ways of Seeing, Dibb collaborated
with Berger on A Telling Eye (1994)
and About Time (1985), which are
showing at 10.30am and 5pm respectively. Come and join
us!

Detail from a large wall chart planning the action of Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976), British Library John Berger Archive.

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